Banks and banks of humming machinery… the Sony EV-C500e

 So having unearthed yet more boxes of old tapes in storage I realised that I had more 8mm tapes than I thought. Most of them date back to the late eighties and early nineties, before I switched to using MiniDV and there is a lot of footage to capture if I’m going to archive them all.

So I’ve set up a capture station using a second Sony VRD, this one is an MC6 which is a slightly more compact unit that is small enough to sit on a shelf under my studio desk.

Initially I was planning to use one of my smaller Hi8 camcorders as a playback deck but then I found this Sony EV-C500e Hi8 video recorder going cheap on eBay.

The EV-C500e was a revised version of the EV-C100 first released in 1993 and externally it is almost identical to the earlier units.

The EV-C500e is a compact bookshelf style with front control panel including jog shuttle and rear connections for video and s-video in/out plus a lanc control point for use with editing controllers.

The supplied remote is a small RMT-V124c model which is similar to several other Sony handsets and is likely to be interchangeable with other models.

The model I bought seems to be in good condition with very little head wear and is fully working.  I cleaned the heads before putting it into operation and so far I’ve had no trouble apart from one of my oldest tapes which had some pre-existing damage that caused it to jam while forwarding and unspool, I had to open up the recorder to remove the tape.

I’ve connected the C500 and MC6 using RCA cables as the MC6 doesn’t have an S-Video connection.  Most of these 8mm tapes are being transferred to DVDR for archiving, but I can connect the C500 to my Blackmagic Intensity for S-Video capture on PC if needed.

 Overall I’m very pleased with this new addition to my editing station.  I love the dark grey colour scheme and the EV-C500e is built with the usual Sony quality so hopefully it will have a few more years of service left in it.  Not bad for a machine that’s almost 30 years old.

Clean over my heads...

Among my many camcorders are a couple of Sony V90e models, these were one of the early Video8 camcorders when they were still fairly large and bulky machines, before the smaller tape formats and palmcorders became available.

The V90e is the same type of camera used in the Steven Soderburgh movie ‘Sex, Lies & Videotape’ and famously pictured in the promotional materials for the movie.

Neither of mine has worked in decades, but on a whim I decided to see if I could resurrect them.  One of them was in good shape cosmetically but tape playback was really choppy with lines all over the screen.

I had assumed the problem was a tracking issue, which would need some specialist equipment to fix, but I thought I might try clearing the heads to see if that helped.

I bought some chamois cleaning swabs with bendable plastic handles (these are much better than cotton swabs as the cotton ones will tend to leave fibres on the recording heads) and set up a clean space to open up the camera.

In order to reach the heads for cleaning I had to remove the tape door cover, which is held in place by a couple of tiny screws.  Removing the screws allows the cover to slide up and off the frame, leaving the tape transport and heads exposed.

I coated a swab in isopropyl (from a vhs head cleaning kit) and then held it gently against the head drum while slowly rotating the heads in an anti-clockwise direction.  I used latex gloves to avoid adding grease or fingerprints to the heads.

After doing this a couple of times I reassembled the camera, hooked up the power and inserted a tape.

Incredibly the cleaning did the trick.  The picture playback was now almost totally clear, with only an occasional flicker in the playback.  The camera still has a few visible bits of dust and lint inside so I expect I will need to repeat this process at some point, but I’m really pleased with the results of my first ever attempt to clean heads without a cleaning tape.

If you have an old camcorder that won’t playback cleanly then it might be worth trying this method to see if it fixes the problem.